Real time visitor tracking (non-JavaScript) for blogs
The first post in the series is Visitor tracking on wordpress.com blogs. The benefits of having real time stats data are knowing who your reading audience is and being better able to target your content to meet their needs. Many bloggers like to install real times stats on their blogs, and some like wordpress.com bloggers, cannot use JavaScript counters on their blogs. Below you will find three free non-Javascript real times stats choices that can be made, and if you click through to the sites you will find more specifics.
A simple breakdown of what the data includes is answers to the following questions:
- How many people are on my website right now?
- Who is visiting my website?
- What countries do my visitors come from?
- Which posts are my visitors reading?
- How many visitors do I get within one or several days?
- How much time do my website visitors spend reading my web pages?
- How popular is my site?
Visitors don’t need to click on anything: just viewing your page is sufficient. We provide (free) the HTML that gives you a tiny map, like the ones below. When it loads, it increments a counter and shows the locations of all visitors to your page, cumulatively (even for huge numbers). Clicking on it zooms in to a big world map, and (optionally) lets you zoom in to the continents. For light users (under 2500 visitors daily) the service is free, forever, and stores cumulative totals up to millions of visitors. Paying users get extra features.
Creating your ClustrMap account is easy. You simply supply the url for your site and an email address (for receipt of your password for signing into Admin), and get a copy of the code to paste into your site.
Instructions for how to add the code below to your site are provided on site. Choose one of the styles below and copy and paste it into a text widget on your site.
[A] Recommended (good for most users)
[B] Minimalist (for MySpace and other sites needing the plainest HTML)
There are two other options as well:
[C] Advanced (for those requiring true W3C XHTML1.1 validation)
[D] BBcode syntax (for BBCode / Wiki / Last.FM and other sites needing it)
Go to the feedjit site and click the widget’s tab:
Feedjit provides the widgets free of charge and they all have an incredibly simple 2 step cut-and-paste installation. You don’t need to register to get the widgets, you can simply grab and go!
To install any of the widgets, simply cut and paste the Javscript for the widget you would like into your blog side-bar. Or if you are a Blogger or Typepad user, you can simply click the links we provide to instantly install the widget on your blog.
WordPress.com, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, LiveJournal and Hi5 users click to get our Non-Javascript Live Traffic Feed.
Step 1:
Customize It! (Choose your color scheme, widget width, and the maximum number of entries to be displayed.)
Step 2: Copy the code into your site HTML or into a text widget.
We also offer a Twitter Widget for all you Twitter addicts out there.
whosamungus
Here are the instructions for wordpress.com bloggers and others who require HTML only (non-JavaScript) widgets:
- Go to the whosamungus site to get the HTML (non-javacript) code you require for the button.
- Customize the button color and font color to suit your blog prior to copying the code.
- Log into your wordpress.com blog and go to -> Dashboard ->Appearance -> Widgets
- Drag a Text Widget out of the Available Widgets box and drop it into in the sidebar box in the position you want it to appear in the sidebar.
- In the larger space below the title for the Text widget paste in the code you copied.
- Click “Save Changes”.
- The button will look like this one, although the widget and font colors will be the customized ones of your choice.
Discussion question:
Do you use one of these free real time visitor tracking widgets on your blog? If so, would you like to share any feedback about the one you use with other bloggers?
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Nice article, I just use the statcounter that comes in the dashboard for the time being. I have registered at statcounter.com but the wordpress one seems sufficient for the time being. Perhaps when I have more visitors I’ll move to one of these live trackers.
@christophertravels
Thanks for reading the post and commenting as well. I have used all three of these free live tracking widgets on my blogs. Please feel free to return if you do decide to install a free live tracking widget on your blog in the future.
Great article! I guess there are not many posts on internet on real-time visitor tracking. One can also see the ‘who’s on’ in sitemeter and ‘recent visitors’ in statcounter.
@Vikas
Your comments about ‘who’s on’ in sitemeter and ‘recent visitors’ in statcounter are relevant so thanks for bringing them up. The advantage to using them is that one can see the details behind the scenes and choose whether or not to enable visitors to view them or not. Using ‘feedjit’ means these details are viewable by your readers on the front of your blog. Using or ‘whosamungus’ means these details are viewable by your readers only if they choose to click through.
BTW, funny header! Halloween-esque I guess! :)
@Vikas
Thanks for the header comment. Vigilance is a theme that allows not only for a custom header but also for customizing background and border colors, as well as, link colors and however colors too. This is my Halloween theme which I will remove a week from now. :)
Until 2 weeks ago, I knew NOTHING about blogging. I have bookmarked your site – there is so much useful information here that it will probably take me months to get through it. Not sure when I am going to start tracking visitors on the blog itself, I too am using the tracker in the dashboard.
Thank you so much for setting up this extremely helpful blog timethief!
@kala marie
I love your photos! I’m also glad that you find my blog to be of value to you as a person who has newly become a blogger. Please feel free to roam at will and if you have questions you will find my email address on my About page.
Happy Blogging :)
I discovered ‘whosamungus’ few months ago and found it very useful indeed since it deals with real-time visitors.
I like the fact that it’s small and unobtrusive but I rely primarily on wp.com stats and sitemeter.
I have been following your blog for past six months and it is a store house of information. My Congratulations for such fantastic blog and a big thanks for all your effort!!
Real time visitor tracking is a big plus for me as I blog about a community where internet penetration is not much but I get fairly decent amount of traffic. I was a bit confused where I was getting visitors from and now after adding whoamongus am a little more clear about my visitors location.
Also let me add that I have (shamelessly) copied the theme of your blog. :) I did this as an experimenting to what I can add with the theme. Plus you also mentioned the tutorials on how to add these changes. Being a non techie myself, experimenting on adding HTML tables was fun.
@Nityin
Thanks so much for the positive feedback and kind words. I hope you find everything you need in my blog. If you don’t then please use the contact form on my Comments page.
There’s also statcounter.com which I am now using. They offer a number of options. I wanted something simple where I could control the background color and font size & color. The site gives you specific instructions on how to add the counter.
@kalaMarie
Yes statcounter, sitemeter and active meter were covered in the first post in the series is Visitor tracking on wordpress.com blogs. Thanks for your comment.
Excellent article on real time blog traffic tracking for worpress.com users. Few weeks back I was looking for similar information on the web, I wish you had published it earlier. I am also using real time invisible tracking provided by http://tracker.icerocket.com. They do provide non-java script code for wordpress.com users. What is your opinion about this?
@Barry
I’m glad to hear you are finding what you need in terms of stats counters.
Hi TT,
Thanks for both reports. After reading the two articles, I thought it best to use both Cluster and Sitemeter. I am not too worried about the limit of 100 visitors in Site Meter. Thanks to wordpress.com’s Stats, I can use it for overall picture. Sitemeter can give me some finer details on those 100 visitors.
I’ve also worked on the About page and added an email subscription. On the About page, I added a brief bio on myself.